Why do people think that MS needs "saving"? They have been predicting MS's death for, what 10 years now? And MS is still making money hand over fist, without any signs of slowing down.
OK, maybe web apps are "where the future is" -- but so were the network computer and the Linux desktop. And, if anybody can make a ton of $$$ out of "yesterday's business plan", that's MS.
If anything, the anti-MS camp needs less hyperbole and more follow-through. "When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk".
(BTW, I'm an old Unix hand, not a Windows fan at all.)
As a frequent user of Office, I'm still far from sold on the idea of Google Docs being the future. Maybe the very distant future, but certainly nobody will be using it (or competitors) in 5 years, and unlikely any significant amount will be in 10.
It's simply overextension of the modern mania for moving stuff to the web.
Google Docs allowed me to complete the switch to Linux and Mac. I can easily exchange Word and PDF copies of my documents with email contacts, never have to worry about which partition my files happen to be on today, and better yet: access my documents from anywhere.
I love the fact that Google can take documents from GMail and with one click open them in Google Docs. The ability to share and collaborate on documents is awesome as well. Emailing the same file over and over again to an entire mailing list and making sure not to loose revisions is a thing of the past.
Turns out people like to communicate and collaborate and they like the convenience of having their files available everywhere. MS has failed to deliver in this area.
Google Docs is simply a web storage. The actual "office" part, specifically the text editing, is done by a rich text control embedded into your browser, which is written in C++ or plain C i.e. it is as much "web" as Office itself, only many times less powerful. Closest Windows desktop equivalent? The mighty WordPad circa 1994!
You could have completed your Linux switch without Google Docs. AbiWord kicks GDocs' butt, as well as KWord, I am not even talking about Sun's junk.
We tried to use Google docs and for anything more complex than 2-3 paragraphs of simple text it was inadequate. You can't even control line spacing for god's sake.
The entire browser's set of controls is written in C or C++ and is provided by underlying OS the browser runs on. On Windows it's RichEdit control. On Linux it's something else. There is no API in existence that lets you do anything outside of browser limitations.
JavaScript is only used to manipulate API of those controls, but not to implement controls themselves. This means that "Office" part of Google Docs is implemented by FireFox/IE/Safari, where google only provides storage for their output.
Everything in the browser eventually comes down to C/C++. But as far as I can tell controls like the Yahoo UI Rich Text Editor are implemented in pure Javascript. And by this I mean it modifies the DOM in Javascript (and the browser handles rendering the updated DOM) as opposed to using browser magic (like an ActiveX control in IE). If I'm wrong, could someone please point me to documentation explaining exactly how these RTE's are implemented?
Maybe it didn't work for you. I use it to manage my resume for example without a single problem. I can access it from anywhere, share it with people, track changes and email word or PDF copies. I haven't used a desktop word processor in the last year (unless I'm opening some file from a backup disk that I haven't had a chance to upload).
And wordpad was a pretty decent editor. The problem is it couldn't open word files sent by others (so I always had to install Office or convert files to RTF). Turns out most word documents render just fine in RTF.
Probably because if you believe that web apps are where the future is, then Microsoft's business model is severely screwed because they have no products that compete in that space, they don't control it (despite IE market share), and they have continuously demonstrated that they don't understand it. Maybe buying Yahoo is part of their attempt to kill the web app future. Maybe buying Yahoo is a brilliant move, not an act of desperation.
I agree, which is why I suggested in an earlier thread that Jerry Yang could conceivably replace Ray Ozzie in a Microsoft/Yahoo merger. Ray Ozzie may be an awesome programmer (but I've never used one of his programs), but he isn't doing a very good job with Windows Live.
I'm using Windows Live Messenger (yeah, I know it's just MSN), Windows Live Mail (I prefer to use this than Outlook. Thunderbird or GMail), Windows Live Space (lots of my friends are using it too), Windows SkyDrive (hey, at least I know MS isn't trying to sell the division like DivShare tried to do).
OK, maybe web apps are "where the future is" -- but so were the network computer and the Linux desktop. And, if anybody can make a ton of $$$ out of "yesterday's business plan", that's MS.
If anything, the anti-MS camp needs less hyperbole and more follow-through. "When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk".
(BTW, I'm an old Unix hand, not a Windows fan at all.)